Review: Triumph revs up the rock at joyful San Antonio concert

Hold on to your dreams. Fight the good fight. Never surrender.

The happy, cheering fans who nearly filled the Frost Bank Center might have been attending a pep rally the night before the Spurs’ first home game in the NBA Western Conference finals. 

Instead, it was a throwback Thursday as the Canadian rock band Triumph returned to San Antonio for the first time in decades on its Rock and Roll Machine Reloaded Tour. It got loud.

The last time the band played here, Henry Cisneros was mayor and the Spurs had never been in the NBA Finals — David Robinson wouldn’t be  drafted until the next year, 1987.

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Still, there was plenty of silver and black in the audience: black concert T-shirts touting acts like Moxy, Budgie and Michael Schenker, and lots of silver-haired fans, some of whom likely started following Triumph when San Antonio radio station KISS played their songs in the late ’70s before they even had a U.S. record deal.

Triumph’s biggest success came in the early ’80s with gold and platinum albums, rock radio hits like “Magic Power” and “Spellbound” and an appearance at the US Festival.

The band that played here Thursday night wasn’t the power trio from those days. Bass player Mike Levine was at home in Toronto, unable to tour because of his health. And guitarist and singer Rik Emmett and drummer and singer Gil Moore had some all-star support: Bon Jovi guitarist Phil X; Todd Kerns, who plays bass in Slash’s band; and drummer and keyboard player Brent Fitz, who has worked with Slash and Motley Crue’s Vince Neil.

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They all contributed vocals, punching up high notes and choruses — Phil X even took the lead on “Spellbound” — and gave the original Triumph members a chance to catch their breath or, in Moore’s case, step out from behind his drum kit.

Emmett, who referred to the new musicians as a “safety net bigger than this arena,” still had the skills that landed him on the cover of Guitar Player magazine.

His extended solo on what Moore described as a “Texas-sized version of ‘Rock and Roll Machine’ ” detoured into jazz and flamenco, and the conclusion of “Blinding Light Show” — an old-school San Antonio favorite — earned a prolonged ovation before the song had even ended.

Emmett later said Moore told him backstage, with a heavy dose of irony, that “you really bombed out there.”

Phil X also had a chance to shine on the band’s cover of the Joe Walsh song “Rocky Mountain Way.”

“I’m not following that (expletive),” Emmett said when he came back onstage. “That was crazy.”

In addition to revving up their rock and roll machine, Triumph delivered something less common at arena shows — sentiment.

At one point, Moore recalled how bass player Levine would tell fans at every concert that “Triumph loves you,” and he asked the audience to return that emotion loud enough so Levine could hear it 10,000 miles away.

And before the band closed its main set with “Magic Power,” Emmett talked about how the band’s reunion tour grew, in part, out of younger music fans discovering them by Shazaming their songs at baseball and hockey games. “Lay It On the Line” was played during last year’s NHL playoffs.

“I think that the world got itself in a bad spot,” he said, adding that the opportunity to get back in front of audiences and play joyful music shows that “some things are (still) pretty good.”

Kind of like a winning basketball team.

Fellow Canadian rockers April Wine opened the concert, getting the old-school vibes going with an 11-song set that include their rock radio hits “Roller,” “Sign of the Gypsy Queen” and “Just Between Me and You.”